Court cases in the folk/trad scene are rare - pop is where the rich pickings are for lawyers. The few cases there have been don't constitute a trend you can infer anything meaningful from.

An ongoing irritation is ownership of unpublished manuscripts, where copyright stays with the owner. There's one I'd like to do something with which was completed in 1710-ish - not a note of it has ever entered the public sphere. John Clare's unpublished manuscripts (probably including a bunch of folk material) have been in private ownership since his death - you can see them at a British library but can't copy or publish anything from them, on the say-so of an American academic who bought the rights decades ago and bulmerized them.